But Esser, who oversees curriculum
and instruction for the Sheridan School District, has trouble finding teachers
who have both skills.

"You don't have a plethora of
qualified content and English-language teachers," she said. "They just don't
come with both qualifications."

Yet finding such teachers - as well
as designing tests and curriculum to better suit English-learners - is becoming
more of a priority statewide as the English-learner population booms.

Sheridan,
which serves 1,700 students, saw its nonnative-English- speaking population
balloon from about 50 kids in 1990 to more than 670 students this year, Esser
said.

A national report released Thursday
by the Alliance for Excellent Education found that from 1995 to 2005, the
population of Colorado's public school students not proficient in English grew
238 percent.

It jumped from 27,000 students in
public schools during the 1994-95 school year to 91,000 students during the
2004-05 school year, according to Jeanne Batalova, policy analyst with the
Migration Policy Institute, which contributed to the report.

Schools are not prepared to serve
the growing population, particularly adolescents in sixth through 12th grades,
the report said.

"Not only do these students have to
master complex course content ... they have fewer years to master the English
language," according to the report, titled "Double the Work, Challenges and
Solutions to Acquiring Language and Academic Literacy for Adolescent English
Language Learners."

As a result, the report said, older
English- learners are falling behind, showing dramatically lower graduation
rates and poor test scores. On the 2005 National Assessment for Educational
Progress test, a nationally administered test, just 4 percent of eighth-grade
English-learners were proficient or advanced readers, according to the report.

State officials acknowledge Colorado
is struggling to keep up.

"We just haven't kept up with
capacity," said Barbara Medina, English Language Acquisition director for the
Colorado Department of Education. "We're aware of them. ... They're falling
behind in terms of reading."

Medina
said that for the roughly 110,000 students in Colorado who are currently
English-language learners, there are just about 2,400 teachers.

She said educators are talking
across states, trying to identify the best practices.

Mark Clarke, professor of language,
literacy and culture at the University of Colorado at Denver, said his students
working as teachers increasingly want to learn how to teach nonnative-English-
speaking students.

"We have experienced teachers who
for the first time are having to work with limited-English students," Clarke
said. "They didn't go in to work with it, but they can't avoid it."

Esser said the Sheridan district has
gone from having one teacher work with English-learners in each of its four
buildings, to one teacher per grade. Of those, seven are also trained to teach
core subjects.